Emma Kavanagh’s new novel opens with one of the most nail-biting, breath-taking crime scenes I’ve ever read. It’s early morning and a woman is crossing a leafy square in the middle of London. A killer is lying in wait. Before she knows what’s happening, the woman is dead, her throat cut and torso stabbed in a frenzied attack. The killer disappears in broad daylight.
Enter DS Alice Parr. Like many fictional detectives, she’s a flawed person. In her case, the flaw is visible - a scar on her face from an earlier traumatic event. So begins a gripping game of cat and mouse as Parr attempts to track down the killer.
But first she needs to identify the victim - a woman of many names and different guises, who has a wardrobe full of wigs and sleeps with a knife under her bed.
The trail takes our detective from London to New York, in pursuit of a man who evades identification, shifts shape and appears to know far more about her than she does about him.
This is a tense page-turner, written in crisp, elegant prose. It packs a powerful emotional punch and left this reviewer breathless with admiration. Paul Burston New novel ‘The Closer I Get’ out July 2019